Premade dishes at a supermarket in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province, on April 27, 2022. [Photo/IC]

Twenty companies headquartered in Guangdong province were listed in the Hurun China Pre-Cooked Food Companies 2023 catalog, which was released in Foshan on Friday.

Guangdong, known for its delicious cuisines for centuries, is followed by Shanghai, with 14 listed enterprises, and Beijing, with 12 enterprises, according to a Hurun report jointly released by The Hurun Research Institute and The International Pre-Cooked Food Industry Conference in Foshan, China.

The enterprises on the list include 42 public companies and 58 others, it said. It is the first time Hurun has released a top 100 list for pre-cooked food companies.

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said China's pre-cooked food industry has enjoyed rapid development in recent years.

"China's pre-cooked food marketing scale reached about 350 billion yuan ($52.24 billion) in 2021, up 20 percent year-on-year," Hoogewerf said.

The pre-cooked food marketing scale in the country is expected to hit more than 1 trillion yuan in five years, he said.

Chinese companies in the pre-cooked food industry have increased to more than 70,000 from about 2,000 recorded more than a dozen years ago, he said.

"Interestingly, when you eat out, the proportion of the pre-cooked dishes you eat is much more than you think, because Chinese restaurants in the malls probably use pre-cooked dishes to meet fire-control requirements," he said. "Since so many restaurants have opened in major shopping malls, we can imagine high demand for pre-cooked dishes in the catering industry."

Moreover, China has the most developed takeout industry in the world, he said.

Hoogewerf said he was glad to join hands with the organizing committee of the International Pre-Cooked Food Industry Conference (Foshan, China) to release the Hurun China Pre-Cooked Food Companies 2023 catalog, which will help more people pay attention to and understand the industry.

"I hope the release of the list will get more large enterprises to care about and participate in this industry, as the technology and scale of these large enterprises are very suitable for producing pre-cooked dishes," he said.

The sector has entered a golden era of rapid development and innovation, he said, adding that he believes the top 100 list will be very different, with emerging enterprises being included in the list within five years.